Each act of the ballet draws on one of Virginia Woolf's novels – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – as well as extracts from her autobiographical writings, to capture her unique way of representing the world.

The performance, which was broadcast to cinemas in February 2017, will be presented by former Principal of The Royal Ballet and 'Strictly Come Dancing' judge Darcey Bussell and BBC broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill.

Wayne McGregor has created many works for The Royal Ballet in his ten years as Resident Choreographer – in this film he explains why he wanted to create a ballet inspired by English writer Virginia Woolf, and why he chose the form of a triptych.

‘She loved dance and music. She wanted to write as if she were writing music and choreographing dance’, explains McGregor. ‘I thought it would be a wonderful thing to try and reinterpret that and to translate [her] novels into something for the stage.’

‘Nobody writes quite like Woolf. Everything you see is vivid, heightened and full of colour and feeling,’ says dramaturg Uzma Hameed, who helped McGregor bring her work to the stage. Set to music by Max Richter, each act draws on one of Woolf's best-loved novels – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – as well as extracts of her autobiographical writings.

'Mrs Dalloway is a beautiful story about people, about human relationships', says McGregor. 'It's a woven, textured story which is full of imagination and pain and beauty. Orlando is this romp through 300 years of history, and as Woolf was super-interested in science fiction, in astronomy and things "other", it really suited my alien aesthetic. The third piece, The Waves, is partly her letters and biography colliding with this phenomenal story about growing older, and letting go.'

McGregor says trusting dancers to interpret his movement for themselves is what keeps his choreography so energized. ‘I love offering something to an amazing dancer and [seeing them] give me something back that I could never have done on my own. That’s why casting is really important.’

Italian dancer and Guest Artist of The Royal Ballet Alessandra Ferri also reveals how she much she enjoyed getting into the character of Mrs Dalloway:

'Mrs Dalloway was my age, a woman in her 50s, but in her memory, she was a teenager. And so am I – we all have our life inside of us.’

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Woolf Works was performed at the Royal Opera House as part of the 2016/17 Season.

The production is staged with generous philanthropic support from The Tsukanov Family Foundation.

Dance makers have been inspired by any and all types of music, whether music written especially for the ballet – from Tchaikovsky and Debussy to Stravinsky and Prokofiev – or pre-existing music by Chopin, the Rolling Stones or anyone else. But the frequency with which choreographers have been drawn towards minimalist music is striking.

That said, it’s important to remember that the term ‘minimalism’ is not well defined, and has been controversial ever since it was coined in the 1960s. It was first used to refer to avant-garde artists and sculptors including Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, but neither they nor the composers that came slightly later – Philip Glass, Steve Reich and their peers – have any time for the term at all. What’s more, their musical (and artistic) styles can be very contrasting, making it hard to talk about a ‘minimalist’ movement. ‘We were just swimming in the same soup’, Reich has said.

That soup has a few identifiable ingredients, though, which may be what has whetted the appetite of all those choreographers. First of all, much minimalist music (not all) makes use of repetition. Reich’s early It’s Gonna Rain loops a short fragment of a sound recording over and over again, allowing variations to emerge as two versions fall out of sync with each other. Wayne McGregor drew on this use of varied repetition in the first part of Multiverse, where two dancers performed subtly changing versions of the same choreography, in time with It’s Gonna Rain. With very different results, Jiří Kylián also uses the hypnotic, repetitive power of Reich’s music – Drumming, this time – in his 1989 work Falling Angels, in which eight women perform precisely identical (or almost identical) movements.

Contrastingly, some minimalist music has appealed to choreographers for its startling emotional punch. Henryk Górecki’s Symphony no. 3, for instance – the ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ – begins with a slow and searing setting of a 15th-century Marian lament. This piece, one of the best selling contemporary classical works ever in its 1992 recording on Nonesuch records, has been used as the basis for a number of dance works by choreographers including Krzysztof Pastor and Nacho Duato – and now Crystal Pite, who sets the first movement in her new creation for The Royal Ballet, Flight Pattern.

Composers of minimalist music have also written a great many works expressly to be choreographed – from Reich’s Runner, commissioned to be the second part of Multiverse, to Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles, a ‘dance-opera spectacle’ from 1996. Max Richter can’t be easily categorized as a minimalist, drawing as he does on an eclectic range of influences, but those aspects of his music which recall composers such as Glass – the diatonic harmony, the repeating patterns – are a part of what makes his music so perfect to dance to, as his Royal Ballet works Infra and Woolf Works show.

There’s very little that connects a piece like Spiegel im Spiegel to something like It’s Gonna Rain – the use of repetition, albeit in very different ways, is perhaps the only connection. And the dance works that this varied music has inspired are just as diverse. For a number of reasons, so-called ‘minimalist’ music has shown itself to be choreographers’ best friend… over and over again.

The production is given with generous philanthropic support from Ian and Tina Taylor and The Taylor Family Foundation, Richard and Delia Baker and Sue Butcher (Flight Pattern) and Kenneth and Susan Green (After the Rain).

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Each act of the ballet draws on one of Virginia Woolf's best-loved novels – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – as well as extracts of her autobiographical writings, to capture her unique way of representing the world.

Woolf Works was McGregor’s first full-length work for the Royal Opera House main stage. Receiving rapturous acclaim after its premiere in 2015, the ballet returns as part of the continuing celebrations to mark McGregor’s tenth anniversary as Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet.

Deeply engaged with a wide range of art forms, Woolf was particularly fascinated by dance and absorbed its language into her creative process. Her writings, imbued with movement and feeling, have in turn inspired Wayne McGregor in his creation about her life and work.

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington on 25 January, 1882. As Virginia Woolf, she was to become one of the most significant figures in London’s literary society and a leading modernist and feminist thinker.

She came from artistic stock; her father Sir Leslie Stephen was an eminent editor and critic who exposed his children to an influential Victorian literary crowd. Her mother, who died when Virginia was just 13 years old, had been a model for the pre-Raphaelites, a group of English painters.

In her early years, Woolf lived in the white town house with her three siblings Vanessa – later known as Vanessa Bell – and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian Stephen.

‘Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall?’, wrote Woolf in her diary in 1921. She spent every summer of her childhood in St Ives at the family holiday home, Talland House. The wild coast was to make notable impressions on her writing.

In 1910, Virginia Woolf was part of the infamous (and to modern minds somewhat unsavoury) Dreadnaught hoax, organized by her brother while he was at the University of Cambridge. It was executed by a group of his friends that would later form the Bloomsbury Group, a spin off from the exclusive Cambridge society, The Apostles. The group caught the train from Paddington to Weymouth, where they enacted a prank on the Royal Navy, claiming to be a delegation of Abyssinian royalty and convincing the armed forces to give them a tour of their flagship HMS Dreadnought. Woolf donned a fake beard an Orientalist regalia for the occasion.

As they toured the vessel to a guard of honour, the group muttered among themselves in Latin and Greek to the bemusement of the crew, and even attempted to bestow fake military honours on some of the sailors. When the prank was uncovered after the group's return to London, the incident caused the Navy a good deal of embarrassment in the press for several months.

After the death of her father in 1904, Woolf sold her house near Hyde Park and moved to 46 Gordon Square with her brothers. It was to be the first of five Bloomsbury addresses at which the writer would reside. It was here that Woolf became close to members of the Bloomsbury Group including founding writer Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, her soon-to-be husband Leonard Woolf and other artists like the poet Rupert Brooke.

In 1912 in a humble registry office on Judd Street, Virginia became Mrs Woolf. Despite her prevailing battle with bipolar disorder over the coming decades, Woolf attested all her happiness to her husband Leonard – her final written words read, ‘I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been’.

In 1914, the Woolfs moved out of central London to Richmond. The following year they moved to Hogarth House in Paradise Road and established The Hogarth Press – publishing work of T.S. Eliot among other contemporary writers, including Woolf herself.

Just east of Oxford, Garsington Manor was owned by a Bloomsbury Group socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband Philip. It became a retreat for many of the ‘Bloomsberries’, including Woolf.

It was later bought by the Leonard Victor Ingrams who founded the Garsington Opera festival, which from 1989 to 2011 was held each summer at the manor (and which now continues at the nearby Wormsley Estate).

‘It will be an odd life, but… it ought to be good for painting’, said Vanessa Bell of her relocation to Sussex with her lover Duncan Grant. Vanessa’s house, Charleston, became the country meeting place for the writers, artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group and was situated only a short distance from Woolf’s own country cottage.

The house still retains work by the Bloomsbury artists, including murals, painted furniture, ceramics and textiles. Bell and Grant created beautiful walled gardens in the grounds in the 1920s, with a grid of gravel paths to divide up each section of floral colour.

The Woolfs bought the 18th-century cottage Monk's House in Sussex in 1919 and lived there full-time after their flat in Bloomsbury was damaged during an air raid in 1940. The cottage is situated three miles from Lewes and is near the River Ouse, where Woolf would drown herself a year later.

Between the Acts, her final novel published posthumously in 1941, references the countryside and villagers of Rodmell. The house is now owned by the National Trust and is open to the public.

Woolf Works was last performed from 21 January–14 February 2017. This article has been amended to remove references relevant to the 2017 performances.

The production is given with generous philanthropic support from David Hancock, Randa Khoury, Linda and Philip Harley, Victoria Robey, The Woolf Works Production Syndicate and an anonymous donor.

Presented by Director of The Royal Ballet Kevin O'Hare, a pre-opening night livestreamed Insight event at 7.30pm on 13 January 2017 included interviews with McGregor, who celebrates ten years as Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet this Season, and his long-time collaborator Richter, who created the mesmerizing orchestral and electronic score especially for this work.

The work of Virginia Woolf, in common with that of many great artists, is not easy to summarize. It is profound, visionary, daring and experimental, but equally at times playful, personal and intimate – and it is always deeply humane.

Her subject matter is a kind of pure research into the nature of language, personality, voice, and the question of being itself. She seems constantly to ask us: ‘how can we live?’ It’s this that drew me obsessively to her writing in my early twenties. And so, having worked together previously on Infra and Future Self, I was excited when Wayne McGregor invited me to collaborate again on Woolf Works, his new ballet based on three of the novels: Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves.

The process of finding the musical languages for the three sections of Woolf Works was two years of theorizing, planning, research and experiment. Clearly the three novels are distinct universes, each needing their own coherent musical grammar, and yet the ballet needed to hold together, to have an overall musical fingerprint, embodying the voice of the author in her manifold guises. Finding a way to reconcile these demands was the fundamental question, and led me to a hybrid language: the score for Woolf Works uses the traditional orchestra, soloists, real-time and prerecorded electronic music, live digital signal processing and spatialization.

The music for the Mrs Dalloway section of the ballet, entitled ‘I now, I then’, opens with an extraordinary recording of Virginia Woolf herself, reading the essay ‘On Craftsmanship’ in a BBC recording of 1937. How incredible to hear her voice. It’s actually Virginia Woolf!

Next comes a multi-layered and elusive web of musics that prefigures all that is to come: disparate rhythmic and melodic strands, pulsations, electronic atmospheres, found sounds and field recordings populate the aural space as our focus is shifted by the continuously unstable metrical scheme. The music shimmers as Clarissa Dalloway hurries through it.

After the opening material, the act focusses on three central characters in this remarkable novel: namely, those of Peter, Sally and Septimus. The 'Peter' music and the 'Sally' music are related, since both characters are, for Clarissa Dalloway, people with whom she had a strong connection in the past – roads not taken on her journey through life. For this reason, the music, while deliberately simple, hides a number of asymmetries and trapdoors in the harmonic and rhythmical language; I wanted it to feel subliminally as though the material is misremembered after a long absence. The music for Septimus, the shell-shocked war veteran, is a mini de profundis, built around the typically English device of a ground bass, over which the cello solo unfolds, starting at the bottom of the instrument, and ascending to a space beyond our sight.

Throughout the act we hear the city of London, represented by a field recording of Big Ben, a sound Virginia Woolf would have heard every day. I always felt that the city itself is an important voice in the novel – much as Dublin is the canvas for the the wanderings of Joyce’s Mr Bloom in the near-contemporaneous Ulysses, so the streets of London accommodate the trajectories of Clarissa Dalloway and her friends.

‘Becomings’, which forms the second part of the ballet, is based on Woolf’s Orlando, a novel of transformations, stretching across many locations and historical episodes. I immediately started to think about the similarities with variation form – the musical process where a recognizable theme is transformed and re-ordered to reveal new aspects of its character – so I chose this process of variation as the basis of the Orlando music.

The theme I chose for these variations is the well-known fragment La Folia, which has been used by numerous composers since the middle of the 17th century, among them Corelli, Marais, Lully, Vivaldi, Bach, Scarlatti, Handel and Geminiani. However, I wanted the palette to be one which could only exist today; so in addition to variations for the whole orchestra, for solo instruments and for chamber groupings, there are also variations which are wholly electronic, incorporating analogue modular synthesis, sequencing, digital signal processing and computer-generated synthesis. Of the 17 variations in the ballet, about half use this extended palette – for me these reflect the shifts in personal and chronological perspective in the narrative.

‘Tuesday’, the third act of the ballet, is a journey through Woolf’s dream-like novel The Waves, and is prefaced by a reading by Gillian Anderson of her last piece of writing, her profoundly moving suicide note. This ‘theme’ of suicide connects to the Septimus episode in Act I, and so I wrote music that relates to that material, in that it is once again structured around a ground bass. The wave-like melodic contours in the music build over 20 minutes and incorporate a solo soprano, as if she were a solitary submerged figure in the oceanic orchestral texture.

What a brilliant, creative human being Virginia Woolf was. It’s been extraordinary once again to have the chance to be engaged in the matters that troubled her, the questions she wrestled with and the visionary quality of the answers she discovered.

Woolf Works runs 21 January–14 February 2017. Tickets are still available.

Virginia Woolf was an English writer and modernist icon whose works defied the narrative conventions of her time, and continue to provoke powerful responses today. Deeply engaged with a wide range of art forms, Woolf was particularly fascinated by dance and absorbed its language into her creative process. Her writings, imbued with movement and feeing, have in turn inspired Wayne McGregor in the creation of Woolf Works about her life and work.

Multiple perspectives

Woolf’s shifting, non-linear writings conflate multiple perspectives, feelings and moments into new, abstract narratives. In keeping with this collaging of ideas, Woolf Works draws on three of Woolf’s best loved novels – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves – as well as her own life and experiences. The result is a ballet that re-creates Woolf’s heightened world, as dramaturg Uzma Hameed explains: ‘More than anything, we wanted watching the ballet to feel like reading Woolf – to convey the luminosity, sonorousness and poignancy of her world, the absolute modernity of her vision.’

New music

For Woolf Works, McGregor commissioned a new score from the acclaimed British composer Max Richter. Richter is one of McGregor’s longstanding collaborators: together they’ve worked on the ballets Infra and Kairos, and on Richter’s chamber opera Sum. For Woolf Works, Richter combines orchestral forces with electronics to create a score that shifts between mesmerizing, perpetually unfolding musical material and thrilling surround sound.

Creative collaborations

McGregor is celebrated for his collaborative works that go far beyond established ballet conventions – and Woolf Works once again demonstrates his deep engagement with other art forms. In addition to Richter and dramaturg Hameed, McGregor’s creative team for the ballet includes dynamic set designs from architectural studios Ciguë and We Not I, lighting design by Lucy Carter, film designs by Ravi Deepres, sound design by Chris Ekers, costume designs by Moritz Junge and make-up by Kabuki.

Royal Ballet past and present

Woolf Works was McGregor’s first full-length work for the Royal Opera House main stage. Its premiere in 2015 received rapturous acclaim and four- and five-star reviews across the board. This, its first revival, is part of continuing celebrations to mark McGregor’s tenth anniversary as Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. The two casts star former Royal Ballet Principal Alessandra Ferri, who created the role, and former Principal Mara Galeazzi, making her role debut.

Woolf Works runs 21 January–14 February 2017. Tickets are still available.

The production is given with generous philanthropic support from David Hancock, Randa Khoury, Linda and Philip Harley, Victoria Robey, The Woolf Works Production Syndicate and an anonymous donor.